An industrial control design and testing system allows vendor-specific digital twins of industrial robots to be imported into a vendor-agnostic simulation platform so that coordinated operation of the robots within the context of a larger automation system can be simulated and observed. Rather than requiring a designer to re-write the robot program in a format understandable by the simulation system, the design and testing system can link to instances of the vendor-specific robot simulation platforms to facilitate execution of the actual robot programs that will be installed and executed on the corresponding physical robots. This accurately simulates operation of the robots in a manner that requires less development work on the part of the designer and allows the robot's surrounding environment to be modeled and simulated more accurately than would be the case using a simulation platform specific to a particular robot vendor.
Legal claims defining the scope of protection, as filed with the USPTO.
2. The system of claim 1, wherein the digital twins are virtual robot models representing industrial robots provided by different robot vendors.
3. The system of claim 1, wherein the vendor-specific execution resources comprise at least one of a proprietary execution algorithm, a proprietary library, or a proprietary operating system.
6. The system of claim 4, wherein the simulation component is configured to execute the simulation at a faster-than-real-time speed determined by a time base specified via user input.
7. The system of claim 4, wherein the model import component is further configured to import the three-dimensional virtual model of the industrial automation system from a computer-aided design system.
8. The system of claim 4, further comprising an aspect metadata component configured to assign aspect metadata to selected elements of the three-dimensional virtual model in accordance with aspect specification input data, the aspect metadata defining simulation behaviors of the selected elements to be simulated by the simulation component.
11. The method of claim 10, wherein the digital twins are virtual robot models representing industrial robots provided by different robot vendors.
12. The method of claim 10, wherein the accessing the vendor-specific resources comprises accessing at least one of a proprietary execution algorithm, a proprietary library, or a proprietary operating system.
13. The method of claim 10, wherein the executing of the simulation further comprises performing coordinated simulation of the digital twins within a common simulation environment of the simulation platform.
14. The method of claim 13, further comprising emulating, by the simulation platform, execution of an industrial control program on a virtual industrial controller, wherein the executing of the simulation comprises simulating operation of the industrial automation system under control of the industrial control program.
15. The method of claim 13, further comprising importing, by the simulation platform, the three-dimensional virtual model from a computer-aided design system.
16. The method of claim 10, wherein the executing of the simulation further comprises executing the simulation at a faster-than-real-time speed determined by a time base specified via user input.
18. Non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 17, wherein the digital twins are virtual robot models representing industrial robots provided by different robot vendors.
19. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 17, wherein the accessing the vendor-specific resources comprises accessing at least one of a proprietary execution algorithm, a proprietary library, or a proprietary operating system.
20. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 18, wherein the executing of the simulation further comprises performing coordinated simulation of the digital twins within a common simulation environment of the simulation platform.
Cooperative Patent Classification codes for this invention. Click any code to explore related patents in that topic.
April 22, 2022
May 2, 2023
Browse 5M+ US patents with plain-English claim translations and AI-generated analysis.